


The First Person She Meets In Heaven

by CrazyTaraWitch



Category: Babylon 5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-20
Updated: 2014-06-20
Packaged: 2018-02-05 10:48:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1815820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrazyTaraWitch/pseuds/CrazyTaraWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Susan Ivanova reaches the end of a long life, and finds that death isn't quite what she expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The First Person She Meets In Heaven

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~  
  
If I’d ever stopped to think about what I thought heaven would be like, I would have thought I’d see my mother. Not as she was when she died, but the way she’d been when I was almost too little to remember. The way she was when there was still enough of her left to love me.  
  
In all my years, I never forgot what it felt like as a child to have her in my mind. It felt so warm and safe. It felt like home.  
  
So if I’d ever bothered to have expectations about the afterlife, it would have been her. It would have been my mother, happy and whole and wrapping her arms and mind around me, and welcoming me home.  
  
I would have expected to see my brother and my father and all the others I’d lost over the years, but my mother would have been first. Because for all that I was jaded, I would have liked to think that Heaven was home, and my mother was the only one who had ever given me that feeling.

I was old by the time I died. Not by Minbari standards, or even human, but I lived far longer than I ever expected. I had thought I would die young in battle like Ganya, or at least before all the damage of my years started to weigh on my body as well as my mind.

John had been gone a long time, and Stephen died a few years after him. I kept in touch with Garibaldi, but it was really only Delenn who was still in my life from Babyon 5. I’d lived so much since that time, but those were the years I felt most alive. And those were the years I had my greatest losses since childhood. Those years had driven me forward in my career, but they had also seen me shut out my heart in a way I never came back from. There were wounds from that time I carried with me still, guilts and burdens that only seemed to weigh heavier with each passing year.   
  
It was Babylon 5 I thought of in my final moments; not God, or any one person I had known, or any one event, but the place and the life I had there. It was those four years that defined me, even more than the loss of my mother or brother, and it was those years I thought back to as I lay dying.

  
In a strange way, that turbulent time was more secure than any I had known since; I had rarely had the answers, but I had always had the conviction that I was following my beliefs and fighting alongside the people I trusted most. And I never once questioned that what we were doing mattered.  
  
Maybe that’s why I remembered those times, to remind myself that my life had meant something. That all our lives had been about something bigger.  I never believed that more than on Babylon 5.

God was English after all, just as I’d thought back when Marcus saved me all those years ago. But it was his words that mattered to me much more than his voice.

Death wasn’t a bright light like the stories tell you. It was dawn and twilight rolled into one. It was peace. And it was a voice saying  _She’s waiting_. And in that moment, I knew who it would be. I moved forward into the soft grey light, and there she was. The one I’d never forgiven myself for losing. The one I’d never forgiven myself for loving.

She was still young and beautiful, and she was once again the woman I had known, no trace of what the Psi Corps had created. There was warmth in her smile again, and love in her eyes.

I would have expected my mother to be the one to welcome me, because she had been my first home. But when I got there home wasn’t what I needed; what I needed was to be whole, and there was only one person who could give me that. She was the last person I let into my heart, and she was the only one who could unlock it again. She was the only one who could help me to forgive myself.

She wrapped her arms around me and I held her close. She smelled of flowers, just as she always had. In life I had never had the chance to hold her like this, and after she was gone I had refused to let myself regret what had never been. Instead I blamed myself for falling for her, for loving her, for not stopping what happened, for ever believing there could be a happy ending for me— believing that I might get to have something as wonderful as her.

I hadn’t cried when I lost her, but I cried when I found her again. When we finally pulled back from the embrace I saw my own tears reflected in her eyes.

“Can you ever forgive me?”

“For what?”

So many things. So many regrets. So much pain and guilt. But I had lived a life to be proud of, fought for things that mattered. What was it I needed forgiveness for?

“For never loving anyone else. For shutting down after I lost you. For Marcus—for never loving him, for letting him love me when I couldn’t… I tried to hate you, and I tried to believe you never loved me, but I couldn’t.”

She stroked my cheek gently and I leaned into the caress. “The time for regret is over. We have each other again. We can be together here Susan. All you have to do is open your heart.”

And somehow here, in Heaven and in her arms, it was that simple.


End file.
